The next morning when Finn leaves for work, we do not talk about what I said in the middle of the night. He asks me a hundred times if I’m all right here on my own, and I spackle a smile on my face and tell him yes, and then the minute he walks out the door I have a panic attack.What if I trip and fall?
What if I cough so hard I can’t stop?
What if there’s a fire and I can’t move fast enough?
All I want to do is call Finn and tell him to come back, but it’s both selfish and impossible.
So instead, I take Candis into the kitchen with me, leaning on the quad cane when I have to balance to get a mug from the cabinet. I fill up the
kettle with water and put it on the stove, moving slowly and deliberately. I grind enough coffee for the Aeropress and congratulate myself on doing all this without stumbling. I slosh hot coffee all over my hand on the way to the table, and the first day of the rest of my life begins.
In the past, when Finn wasn’t working tirelessly through a pandemic, we’d spend our days off lingering over coffee, reading The New York Times and The Boston Globe online. Finn would read aloud highlights about
politics and sports. I gravitated toward the arts pages, and the obituaries. It sounds morbid, but it was actually for work: I kept a running list on my computer desktop of those who might have collections to be sold posthumously at Sotheby’s.
Of course, I don’t have a job at Sotheby’s now. I don’t know when or if I will again. Finn says I shouldn’t worry about that; he thinks we can make do on his salary for a while if we are careful. But I have a feeling there are financial hurdles we’re going to face that we can’t even imagine yet. We are only a month into this pandemic.
The first New York Times banner I read: NYC DEATH TOLL SOARS PAST 10,000 IN REVISED VIRUS COUNT.
The Boston Globe headlines are only marginally less anxiety-producing:
CHELSEA’S SPIKE IN CORONAVIRUS CASES CHALLENGES HOSPITALS AND STATE; BOSTON SCIENTIFIC GETS OK TO MAKE A LOW-COST VENTILATOR.
I click on the link to the obituaries.
Couple married more than 75 years dies within hours of each other: After Ernest and Moira Goldblatt got married in the summer of 1942, they spent the rest of their lives together, right up until the very end. On April 10, the couple passed away at the Hillside Nursing Home in Waltham, less than two hours apart. Moira, 96, had recently tested
positive for Covid-19. Ernest, 100, had been sick but his test for the disease was still outstanding. In an effort to reduce the spread of the
virus, nursing home residents who were infected were transferred to a separate space. But there was no doubt that the Goldblatts would be staying together.
I click to turn the page and scan the names. I click again. And again.
Again.
There are twenty-six pages of obituaries today in The Boston Globe. With shaking hands, I close my computer.
There are already so many people who have lost someone, who’ll never receive another lopsided grin or smooth a cowlick or cry on a shoulder that smells like home. They’ll always see the empty seat at a wedding, a birthday, breakfast.
Why did I survive, when those they loved didn’t?
It’s not like I did anything right—I don’t even remember going to the hospital.
But it’s also not like they did anything wrong.
I feel a crushing sense that if I am here, there has to be an explanation.
Because the alternative—that this virus is random, that anyone and everyone could die—is so overwhelming that it is hard to breathe.
Again.
I’m not conceited enough to think that I am special; I’m not religious enough to think I was spared by a higher power. I may not ever know why I’m still here and why the people in the rooms on either side of me at the hospital are not. But I can pivot on this point of the axis, and make sure
whatever happens from here on in is worthy of this second chance I’ve been given.
I just don’t know what that looks like, exactly.
I reopen my computer, and type into Google: Jobs in art business.
A string of them pop onto my screen: Senior Business Development Manager, Artsy. Adjunct faculty, Institute of Art. Creative Director, Omni Health Corp. Art Director—Business Banking Division, JPMorgan Chase.
All look equally uninspiring.
I truly enjoyed my work at Sotheby’s. I loved the people I met and the art I helped sell.
Or at least that’s what I’d told myself.
I let my mind drift back to the last time I saw Kitomi and her painting.
If I got sick that night, and if asymptomatic people can spread the virus— could I have infected her?
Panicked, I look her up online. As far as I can tell, she is still alive and well in New York with her painting.
I remember how it felt to stand in the presence of that kind of artistic greatness. In front of that Toulouse-Lautrec, my fingers had itched for a brush, even though I was no Toulouse-Lautrec, no Van Gogh. I was a competent artist, but not a great one, and I knew it. Like my father, I could make a decent copy—but that’s different from creating an original masterpiece.
I had grown up in the shadow of my mother’s prize-winning photography. So instead of trying to create my own legacy—and failing—I reshaped my skill set to fit a field adjacent to art.
I erase one word in the search bar.
Jobs in art.
Fashion designer. Animator. Art teacher. Illustrator. Tattoo artist. Interior designer. Motion graphics designer. Art therapist.
Art therapy is the practice of incorporating visual art media to improve cognitive and sensory-motor function, self-esteem, and emotional coping
skills for mental health treatment.
Immediately I am back on a beach in Isabela, making tiny dolls out of flotsam and jetsam and setting them in a sandcastle with Beatriz. I am writing our names on lava rocks and making them part of a standing wall. I am explaining to her why monks make beautiful mandalas and then brush
the sand away.
I’ve already been thinking of another career, without even realizing it.
I’ve practiced it, with Beatriz.
I rub my hand over my face. I imagine filling out an application for admission to a graduate program in art therapy, listing my imaginary experience in the field.
But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the Galápagos wasn’t something that happened, but something that is supposed to happen.
When it starts to feel like a chicken-and-egg logic bomb, I decide that I have done enough job searching for the day. Instead, I open up Instagram and see college friends giving thumbs-up on planes, cashing in on cheap vacation deals. Another friend has posted a picture of her aunt, who died yesterday of Covid, with a long tribute. A celebrity I follow is doing a fundraiser for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. My former neighbor posts a teary video about postponing her wedding when they were totally going to do it in a safe way. It’s like there are two different realities unfolding at the same time.
I do not post often on Facebook, but I have an account. When I open it, there are dozens of notifications from acquaintances: Sending healing thoughts! I’m praying for you, Diana. You got this.
Frowning, I click onto the post that inspired these comments. Finn must have logged in to my account, because he’s written a short paragraph explaining that I have been hospitalized with Covid and put on a ventilator.
I tamp down the annoyance at the thought of him logging in as me. The comments are supportive, effusive, heartfelt. Some are political,
claiming that the virus is a hoax and I have the flu. Other friends attack that poster on my behalf. All this while I was unconscious.
On a whim, I type Covid-19 survivors into the search tab, and a string of articles comes up, as well as a list of support groups. Most are private, but I dive into one that is not and start reading through the timeline.
Has anyone else found their taste has changed? I used to love spicy, and now not so much. Plus, everything smells like bacon.
Sleep is impossible—getting migraines every night.
Am I the only one losing hair? I had long, thick curls and now my hair’s super thin; how long will this last?
Hang in there, someone else has responded. Mine’s stopped falling out! Try zinc.
Try vitamin D.
Tested positive 3/11, tested positive again on day 10, still testing positive a month later—is it safe for me to be around people?
Question for the ones who have had Covid-19: have y’all been getting nosebleeds on just one side?
Can I get this virus again if I’ve already had it?
My doctor won’t believe me when I say that I didn’t have heart palpitations before …
I am getting more and more freaked out. What if leaving the hospital is only just the start? What if I have long-term effects that haven’t even shown up yet?
And if I don’t get them, is that something else to feel guilty about?
I am about to close my laptop, crawl back into bed, and give up when I see another post: Anyone else who was on a vent have weird
dreams/nightmares?
I fall into this rabbit hole and start reading.
I was bike riding around town with my husband. Now, we don’t bike ride, we’re large people. We went to a crowded diner and he went
inside to put our names down for a table. He was gone for a while. Finally I went in and started looking around. I asked the greeter if she’d seen him. She said no and I went back outside and one of the bikes was gone. When they took me off the vent I found out he had passed while I was under. I didn’t even know until two weeks later.
I was in a hospital that was Broadway-themed, but in a bad way, like being trapped in It’s a Small World at Disney, you know? Every hour everything stopped and there was a big musical revue. It was so
crowded that I couldn’t even be in the room to watch it. The only way to get anyone’s attention was by hitting a buzzer, and if you did, the song changed to one of shame, because you weren’t supposed to stop the performance.
I was in space trying to contact people to get help before I ran out of oxygen.
I was at an electronic dance festival and I was some kind of creature in a tank of water, and the people who came to the festival kept feeding
me through tubes while I floated.
I was in a videogame and I knew that I had to beat the other players if I wanted to survive.
I was sitting at my childhood kitchen table and my mother was making pancakes. I could smell them so distinctly and when she brought them over with maple syrup I could taste that, too. When my plate was
empty she put her hand on my shoulder and she told me I had to stay at the table because I wasn’t finished. My mom’s been dead for 32 years.
I can’t remember anything clearly but it was SO REAL. Not like a
dream with jump cuts, or how you’re supposed to wake up the minute before you die. I could feel and smell and see ALL of it. And I died. A whole bunch of times over and over.
I was being kidnapped by the hospital staff. I knew they were Nazis and I didn’t know why no one else could see that. When I woke up for real, they had tied my hands down because I kept trying to hit the nurses.
I was being held captive.
I was in a room that was crawling with bugs and someone told me that this was how you got Covid, and I shouldn’t go near the bugs. But they were already covering me.
My brother and I were in a freight car and we had monitors on us that showed our heart rates going lower and lower because we didn’t have enough air. There was all this garbage in there with us and I found a Christmas card and wrote HELP on it and told my brother to hold it
through the slats in the car’s wooden side.
I was tied to a pole and I knew I was going to be sold as a s*x slave.
I was in the basement of NYU (I’ve never even been to New York City, so don’t ask me why) and someone was trying to give me medicine and I knew it was poison.
I was locked in a basement and tied down and I couldn’t get out.
I pause, thinking of my dream about Finn when I was in the Galápagos, or my not-dream, or whatever it was. It, too, had been in a basement. And I was tied down.
I dreamed that my four-year-old grandson, Callum, drowned. I went to the funeral with my daughter and helped her grieve and lived through her having two more kids, twin girls, Annabelle and Stacy. When I
woke up for real, I asked her if I could see the twins and she thought I was crazy. She said the only grandkid I had was Callum, and sure enough he was alive and well.
I think about my mother’s face, still and white on the iPad, her chest barely rising.
I read for hours, stopping only to eat leftover Thai food for lunch. There are hundreds of posts from people who have been delirious from lack of oxygen or who have, like me, survived ventilation. I read lush, sprawling dreamscapes. Some are terrifying, some are tragic. Some have common
threads—the videogame scenario, the basement entrapment, and seeing
someone who’s died. Some stories are detailed, some are a scant few words. All are described as painfully, unequivocally real.
As one person in the Facebook group puts it: If I’d never woken up, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Everything I was seeing, feeling,
EXPERIENCING was genuine.
For the first time since I’ve awakened, I realize that I’m not crazy. That I’m not alone.
That if all my good memories of the Galápagos didn’t actually happen … then neither did my bad ones.
Which is why, come hell or high water, I am going to visit my mother.
That day, Finn calls me three times from work. Once he asks if he left his phone charger in the bedroom (no). The second time he asks if I want him to pick up dinner on the way home (sure). The third time I tell him he should just ask me how I’m doing, since that’s why he’s really calling.
“Okay,” he says, “how are you doing?”
“Not bad. I’ve only fallen once and I’m pretty sure that the burn on my hand is second degree, not third.”
“What?”
“Kidding,” I tell him. “I’m fine.”
I do not tell him that I have been reading obsessively about other Covid survivors. Or that I am trying to figure out how to get to The Greens safely, given that I can barely walk the length of a city block without resting.
He tells me that he will check in again later, but he doesn’t. I don’t hear from him again till his keys jingle in the lock a full hour after he told me he’d be home. Immediately I get up and start toward him—I’m not even using Candis, just cruising on the furniture when I need a little extra support, and I want to show him—but before I can reach him he holds out his hand like a stop sign. He proceeds to strip off his clothes and stuff them into a laundry bag that he’s wedged underneath the table by the door where we keep our phones and keys and wallets. When he’s wearing only his
boxers and a surgical mask, he edges past me in the hallway. “Just let me rinse off,” he says.
Five minutes later he reappears, dressed and smelling of soap, his hair still wet. I am in the kitchen, awkwardly dragging a Clorox wipe along the wax paper of the two deli sandwiches he’s brought home. I wonder if we will all die from ingesting cleaning solutions.
I scrub my hands thoroughly and bring the plates to the table. Finn immediately takes a giant bite and groans. “First thing I’ve eaten since this morning.”
“So I shouldn’t ask how your day was.”
He glances at me. “This is the best part of it,” he says. “What did you
do?”
“Skydiving,” I tell him. “Then a little light lion taming.” “Underachiever.” His face lights up. “Wait. I have something for you.” He goes to the entryway and digs inside the backpack he carries to work,
coming out with a sealed Ziploc bag. He pulls out a fabric mask, printed with sunflowers. “Thank you?” I say.
“An ICU nurse made it. God knows the last thing I’d want to do after a shift is sit down with a sewing machine, but it was really nice of her. I haven’t had a chance to buy any reusable masks yet, and you can’t wash the blue surgical ones.”
“How does she even know about me?” “She’s the one who snuck me in to see you.” “I don’t want to take your mask—”
“Oh, it’s okay. Athena made me one, too. Without sunflowers.” His cheeks have gone pink.
“Athena,” I repeat. “That’s a real name?” “Greek mom. Dad’s from Detroit.”
I wait for him to say, She’s sixty-five. Or, She’s been married longer than we’ve been alive. Or even to be amused by my jealousy. But Finn doesn’t say anything else, and I put the mask down carefully beside my plate. “You seem to know a lot about her,” I say.
“I guess that’s how it is, when you’re fighting against death together every day,” Finn answers.
I am resentful of a woman who may have helped save my life. I am suspicious of Finn, even though I cheated on him in my dreams.
I force myself to swallow. “Please thank Athena for me,” I say.
While Finn finishes his sandwich, I tell him about a tutorial I saw online today on how to make a homemade mask from the cup of a bra.
Finn smiles, and I achieve my goal: to see his shoulders relax and the tension release. I was the one who made this happen, and that’s who Finn needs me to be.
If there’s one thing we are both good at in this relationship, it’s being predictable.
“I’ve been trying to remember getting sick,” I say. “I know you said you’d tell me anything I want to know. Did I have a headache, before things started getting bad, or—”
“Diana?” Finn cuts me off, rubbing his temples. “Can we … just … not?” He looks up at me, his eyes pleading. “It’s been a day.”
I abandon everything I was about to ask.
“How about a movie?” he says, realizing that he’s shut me down. He stands and yanks me into his arms and buries his face in the curve of my neck. “I’m sorry,” he whispers.
I comb my fingers through his hair. “I know,” I say.
We settle onto the couch and turn on the TV, looking for something completely escapist. Avengers: Endgame is on and we are quickly absorbed. Well, Finn is. I mostly pepper him with questions like why Captain Marvel can’t just use the gauntlet by herself. I do not realize at first that Finn is crying.
It’s the end of the movie, and Pepper Potts is bent over Tony Stark, who’s sacrificed himself to save the universe. She tells him they’re going to be
okay, and Tony just looks at her, because he knows that’s not true, and she kisses him. You can rest now, she says.
Finn’s shoulders tremble and I pull away to look at him. He sinks forward, burying his face in his hands, trying to stifle his sobs. I do not think, in all the years I’ve known Finn, I have ever seen him fall apart like this. It is scary.
“Hey,” I say, touching his arm. “Finn, it’s okay.”
His hand shakes as he wipes it over his eyes. “They asked me to sign a DNR for you,” Finn says. “I didn’t know what to do. I came in and I sat with you and I told you that if you needed to go, it was okay.”
You can rest now.
Maybe, in my sedated haze, I heard him. Maybe I rested, then fought my way back to the land of the living. But Finn, he hasn’t had any time to rest.
He takes a shuddering breath and looks up at me sheepishly. “Sorry,” he murmurs.
I lay my palm on his cheek. “You don’t have to apologize.”
He grasps my hand and turns his face to kiss it. “I didn’t think this was going to happen quite like this,” he says under his breath, and then he looks me directly in the eye. “I knew I wanted to spend my life with you. The thing is, I didn’t really understand what that meant until yours nearly
ended.” He ducks his head. “I had a whole plan for how to do this—but I don’t think I can wait—”
I rocket off the couch, yanking my hand from his. My fingers feel like ice. “I have to … use the bathroom,” I blurt out, and I stumble away from him, closing the door behind me. Inside, I run the faucet and I splash water on my face.
I know what Finn was about to do. It is a moment I’ve dreamed about. So why can’t I let it happen?
I am sweating and I am cold and shaking. I’ve known what I wanted for years. And now that it’s here—
Now that it’s here— I’m not sure I’m ready.
I turn off the water and open the door. Finn is still on the couch, watching the television. His eyes are dry, and they track me as I sit down next to him. “What did I miss?” I ask, looking at the screen.
I can feel his stare on me. I think I hear him say, Okay.
There are topics, I guess, that neither of us is ready to talk about.
I settle myself under Finn’s arm and lean into him again. After a long moment, I feel his words whispered against the crown of my head. “Maybe you should talk to someone. Like … a shrink.”
I don’t look at him. “Maybe I should,” I say.
I focus on the television, as Tony Stark’s ashes are set adrift on a lake.
I know that you can’t run a marathon without training. And I can’t get to
The Greens if I can barely make it to the end of the hallway. So the next day I gather all my courage and go for a walk. The streets are empty. I move deliberately and slowly to the end of the block, where there is a wine and liquor store around the corner.
To my surprise, it’s open. But then again, what business could be more essential?
When Finn comes home that night, I am nearly bouncing with excitement. “Guess what I did,” I say, as soon as he finishes stripping and showering. From behind me on the couch, I hold up a bottle of red wine. “I walked all the way to the liquor store. And now we get to celebrate.”
To my surprise, Finn doesn’t seem happy. “You what?”
My smile falters. “I didn’t break lockdown,” I tell him. “We’re allowed to go out for food.” I look down at the bottle in my hands. “This counts,
right?”
“Diana, you shouldn’t have gone out by yourself,” Finn says. He sits next to me, looking me over like he’s expecting to find a bleeding head wound or a broken bone. “You just got out of the goddamn hospital.”
“I got out of rehab,” I say gently, “and I’m supposed to be challenging myself. Besides, I had to do it sometime. The toilet paper isn’t going to buy itself.”
This is not going the way it is supposed to. Finn should be pleased that I’m getting stronger, that I was brave enough to venture out alone. But at the same time, I realize that when Finn kisses me now, he always presses his lips to my forehead, too, like he’s checking for a temperature. He
watches me when I get up to go to the bathroom or into the kitchen, in case I fall.
I nestle closer until he’s holding me. “I’m fine,” I whisper. I wonder when he is going to stop treating me like a patient, rather than a partner.
“Promise me you’ll wait for me if you need to leave the apartment?” he murmurs.
I hold my breath for a moment, because I can’t take that oath. I’m heading to The Greens tomorrow, no matter what. “One day,” I say gently, “you’re going to have to let me go.”
There is a theory of dementia called retrogenesis, meaning that we lose life skills in the reverse of the order in which we gained them. A doctor told me this when my mother was first diagnosed at age fifty-seven with early-onset Alzheimer’s. A person with dementia, he said, starts out like a ten-year-old. She can be trusted to follow directions on a note that you leave behind.
Eventually, the patient will suffer mental decline until she’s at the stage of a toddler—she can’t be expected to remember to get dressed or to feed herself. The next skills that are lost are continence, speech. The very first
things we master as an infant are the last things we lose: the ability to lift one’s head from a pillow. The ability to smile.
What I remember from that initial visit was asking the doctor how long my mother’s life expectancy would be. Most people with Alzheimer’s
survive from three to eleven years, he told me. But some have been known to live for twenty.
And I had thought, at the time: My God. What am I going to do with her for all that time?
All of this was before I lost her/didn’t lose her in a dream.
Although there is a lockdown in the city, I can easily argue why seeing my mother face-to-face is necessary. I know the trains are running, but
decide to splurge on an Uber.
I haven’t told Finn I’m going. I haven’t told anyone.
When my ride arrives, the driver looks at me in my sunflower mask and I look at him in his KN95 mask, as if we are assessing each other for risk. He glances at my quad cane and I think about telling him that I actually just got over Covid, but that would be counterproductive.
At The Greens, to my surprise, the front door is locked.
I ring the bell, and knock a few times. After a moment, the door opens, revealing a nurse in a surgical mask. “I’m sorry,” she says, “we’re not
open.”
“But these are visiting hours,” I reply. “I’m here for Hannah O’Toole.”
The woman blinks at me. “We’re closed by order of the governor.” She says this with judgment, like I should know better.
Which, I mean, I do.
“I’ve been away for a while,” I tell her, which isn’t a lie. “Look, I don’t have to stay long. It’s kind of a crazy thing—I was under the impression that my mother had passed away but—”
“I’m really sorry,” the nurse interrupts. “But this policy is meant to keep your mother safe. Maybe you could … just call her?”
She closes the door in my face. I stand in the chilly breeze, leaning on my quad cane, thinking about her words. Normally, every few weeks, that’s exactly what I do.
I am about to dial my mother’s number when a car pulls into the parking lot. An elderly man gets out with a bag of birdseed. Instead of going to the front door, however, he walks around the side of the building. Near one of the patient’s screened porches there is a bird feeder. He pours a little of the seed into it and then notices me watching. “I’ve been with her for fifty-two years,” he says. “I’m not going to let a virus ruin a perfect record.”
“You’re visiting your wife?” He nods.
“How?”
He jerks his chin in the direction of the porch. Like my mother’s, it’s a sealed box without an entrance—no one can enter the apartment from out here, but the resident can be outside in a safe way. A door slides open from inside the apartment, and an aide wheels out a woman. She has white cotton-candy hair piled on her head, and a blanket over her narrow shoulders. She is staring vacantly past the man.
“That’s my Michelle,” he says proudly. “Thank you!” he calls to the nurse, who waves and disappears back inside. He walks closer to the screen, pressing his hand against it. “How’s my doll?” he asks, and the woman doesn’t respond. “You have a good week? I saw a cardinal yesterday, at home. First one this year.”
He doesn’t even seem to notice or care that I’m eavesdropping as he talks to her. His wife is motionless, expressionless. It makes my heart hurt.
As I am about to leave, he starts singing in a clear tenor the Beatles song with her name as the title. “Très bien ensemble,” he says, “très bien ensemble.”
Suddenly his wife sparks alive. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” she says.
“That’s right.” A grin splits his face. “That’s right, honey.”
I hurry away around the corner, toward my mother’s screened porch. I dial her phone number. A moment later, she answers. “Hi, it’s Diana!” I say brightly. “It’s so good to talk to you!”
Those sunny, bright inflections at the ends of my sentences, I know, are how she will figure out how to respond. It will have nothing to do with my name, or our relationship, which she doesn’t remember.
“Hi,” she says, tentative but upbeat. “How are you?”
“It’s such a beautiful day,” I say. “You should come out on the porch. I’m right here, enjoying the sunshine.”
She doesn’t respond, and to be honest, I don’t even know if she can
manage the sliding door onto the porch. But a moment later, she steps out into the little space, looking around like she can’t remember why she went there.
I wave the hand that’s not holding the phone. I rip my mask off my face. “Hi!” I say, almost desperately. “Over here!”
She sees me and walks to the edge of the porch. I do the same, and the phone falls away from my ear. She looks healthy and steady and all the
things she was not in my dream. Unexpectedly, my throat is so tight I can’t speak.
She flattens her hand to the screen and tilts her head. “Is it warm for this time of year?”
I know she has no idea what time of year it is, but this is her way of trying to pry open a conversation.
“It is warm,” I manage.
“Maybe they’ll let the fire hydrants run,” she says. “My daughter loves that.”
I am afraid to move, to speak, because I am afraid to ruin this moment. “She does,” I say.
I move closer and press my palm against hers. There’s a screen between us. Where are you? I wonder. The world that my mother inhabits, it’s not
this one. But that’s not to say it isn’t real to her.
It might be the first thing we’ve had in common.
If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have said my mother was a burden, an albatross, a grudging responsibility. She was someone I owed a debt to. But now?
Now I know everyone has their own perception of reality. Now I’m thinking that when we’re in crisis, we go to a place that comforts us. For my
mother, it’s her identity as a photographer.
And for me—right now—it’s here. “You look good, Mom,” I whisper.
Her vision clouds; I can see the exact moment that she slips away from me. I pull my hand back from the screen and tuck it into the pocket of my jacket. “I think I might come visit you more often,” I say softly. “Would you like that?”
She doesn’t respond. “Me, too,” I say.
When I get back to the parking lot, the old man is sitting in his car with the windows open, eating a sandwich. I order my Uber and awkwardly smile at him.
“Good visit?” he asks. “Yes. You?”
He nods. “I’m Henry,” he says. “Diana.”
“My wife, she’s got white matter disease,” he says. He taps his head, as if to underscore this is a brain thing. But then, everyone in the building has a brain thing. Alzheimer’s affects the gray matter, not the white, but the
outcome is the same.
“She only has three words left,” he says. He takes a bite of his sandwich, swallows. Then he smiles. “But they’re the three words I need to hear.”
The sound of ambulance sirens is constant. It gets to the point where they become white noise.
In the middle of the night, I wake up and roll over to realize Finn is missing. I have to shake myself out of sleep to remember whether he’s pulling a night shift. It’s hard to tell time when every day is the same.
But no, we brushed our teeth together and climbed into bed. Frowning, I sit up and pad in the darkness to the living room, calling softly for him.
Finn sits on the couch, limned by moonlight. He is bent like Atlas, bearing the weight of the world. His eyes are closed and his hands are pressed tight against his ears.
He looks at me, his face bruised from his mask, shadows ringing his eyes. “Make it stop,” he whispers, and it’s only then I hear the whine of another ambulance, racing against time.
My therapy session with Dr. DeSantos—like everything else—is going to take place over Zoom. She has been recommended to Finn, and apparently is doing him a favor to schedule a session with me so quickly. When I ask
Finn how he knows her, the tips of his ears go red. “She was made available to residents and interns,” he says, “when a bunch of people started losing it during their shifts.”
Finn is at the hospital during our session, for which I am grateful. I have not told him about my excursion to see my mother—I know he’ll be angry that I went out. I have convinced myself it is kinder not to tell Finn.
I can convince myself of virtually anything these days, it seems. “What you’re talking about,” Dr. DeSantos says, “is ICU psychosis.”
I’ve told her about the Galápagos—haltingly at first, and then with more abandon when it became clear she wasn’t going to interrupt. “Psychosis?” I repeat. “I wasn’t psychotic.”
“An elevated dream state, then,” she points out. “Why don’t we call them
… ruminations?”
I feel a prickle of frustration. Rumination. Like what cows do.
“It wasn’t a dream,” I reiterate. “In dreams you do things like fly through walls or come back to life or breathe water like a mermaid. This was a hundred percent realistic.”
“You were on an island … one you’ve never been to … and you were living with local residents,” the doctor says. “That sounds pleasant. The mind is remarkable when it comes to protecting us from pain we might otherwise feel—”
“It was more than just a vacation. I was sedated for five days, but in my head, I was gone for months. I went to sleep dozens of times there, and I woke up in the same place, in the same bed, on the same island. It wasn’t a
… a hallucination. It was my reality.”
She purses her lips. “Let’s stick to this reality,” she says.
“This reality,” I stress. “What about this feels real? I lost ten days of my life that I can’t remember, and when I woke up suddenly everyone is standing six feet away and we wash our hands twenty times a day and I lost my job and there’s no more sports or movies and all the borders are closed and every time my boyfriend goes to work he runs the risk of catching this virus and winding up—”
I break off.
“Winding up …?”
“Like me,” I finish.
Dr. DeSantos nods. “You’re not the only one with PTSD,” she says. “Dr.
Colson tells me that you work for Sotheby’s?” “Worked,” I correct. “I’ve been furloughed.” “You know what surrealism is, then.”
“Of course.” It was a twentieth-century art movement that elevated the
subconscious and the stuff of dreams: Dalí’s dripping clocks and Magritte’s The False Mirror. The whole point is for the art to make you uneasy, until you realize the world is just a construct. An image that doesn’t make sense to you forces your mind to free-associate—and those associations are key to analyzing reality on a deeper level.
“The reason this all feels surreal is that we’re in uncharted territory,” the doctor says. “We’ve never been through something like this—well, at least most of us haven’t. There aren’t too many people who survived the 1918 Spanish flu who are currently alive. Humans love to find patterns and to
make sense of what we see. When you can’t find those patterns, it’s unsettling. The CDC tells us that we have to social distance, and then the president is on TV without a mask, shaking people’s hands. Doctors say if you feel sick you should get a test, but the tests are nowhere to be found. Your kids can’t go into a classroom, even though it’s the middle of the school year. You can’t find flour on the grocery shelves. We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, or six months from now. We don’t know how many people will die before this is over. The future is completely up in the air.”
I stare at her. This, this is exactly how I feel. Like I’m in a little panga, adrift in the middle of a great, wide ocean.
With no motor and no oars.
“Of course, that’s not really accurate,” Dr. DeSantos says. “The future is going to come, in some form, whether we like it or not. What we really mean is that we can’t plan for the future. And when we can’t plan—when we can’t find those patterns that make sense—we lose the skeleton of life. And no one can remain upright without that.”
“But if everyone’s experiencing this right now,” I ask, “then how come I’m the only one who got dropped into an alternate life?”
“Your rumination,” she says gently, “was your brain doing its damnedest to make sense of a very stressful situation for which you had no reference. Plus, you were on medications that mess with consciousness. You created a
world that you could understand, from building blocks that were lying around your mind.”
I think about the guidebooks I had highlighted. The places I’d seen on Isabela. G2 Tours.
“What you keep referring to as another life,” Dr. DeSantos says, “was a defense mechanism.” She pauses. “Are you still having dreams of the
Galápagos?”
“No,” I say. “But I don’t sleep much.”
“That’s very common for people who have been in the ICU. But it’s also possible that you’re not dreaming because you don’t need to anymore.
Because you survived. Because the outcome isn’t as vague anymore.” My mouth is suddenly dry. “Then how come I still feel lost?”
“Build your scaffolding again, but while you’re conscious. Use the bricks that you’ve still got, in spite of the pandemic. Make coffee in the morning.
Meditate. Watch Schitt’s Creek. Have a glass of wine at dinner. FaceTime
the friends you can’t see in person. Whatever habits you used to have, stack them up and give yourself structure. I promise. You won’t feel as
unsettled.”
I think about surrealist paintings, how you can be startled out of your understanding of what the world should be. To my surprise, tears spring to my eyes. “What if that’s not the problem?”
“What do you mean?”
“I wish I could dream about the Galápagos,” I whispered. “I liked it better there.”
The psychologist tilts her head, pity written on her face. “Who wouldn’t,” she says.
In my past life, I’d groan when my alarm went off and choke down a piece of toast with my coffee and join the millions of people in New York City getting from point A to point B. I’d spend my days buried in work, a mountain that only seemed to get higher the more I climbed it, and when I came home I was too tired to deal with groceries or cook so I ordered in.
Sometimes Finn was here, sometimes he was doing an overnight at the hospital. There were weekends I worked but also weekends when I took
walks to Chelsea Piers, down the High Line, through Central Park. I’d force myself not to think about office politics or what I could be hammering away
at on my laptop to get a head start on the coming week. I’d go to the gym and watch rom-coms on my phone while running on the treadmill.
Now, I have nothing to do and nothing but time. I can cook, but only if I can find a time slot for grocery deliveries, and only if they have the actual ingredients I ask for. And there’s only so much homemade bread a single human can consume.
I finish Tiger King. (I think she’s totally guilty.) I binge Nailed It! I
become obsessed with Room Rater, and after seeing a pundit on television I immediately go to see how their home space fared. I hold virtual happy
hours with Rodney from his sister’s home in New Orleans. I stop wearing pants with buttons. Sometimes, I just cry until I can’t anymore.
One day, I type Coma dreams into the search bar of Facebook.
There are two videos and a link to a story in the Cedar Rapids Gazette. The first video is a woman who was in a coma for twenty-two days after giving birth. When she woke up, she did not recognize her baby, or remember that she had been pregnant. While unconscious, she’d found herself in a palace and her job there was to interview cats—all of which were dressed like courtiers, and all of which could talk. In the video, she
shows sketches she has created of each of them, with tiny ruffs or dangling diamond eardrops or velvet doublets.
“My God,” I whisper out loud. Do I sound as unhinged as that?
The second video is another woman. “When I was in a coma,” she says, “my brain decided that the hospital was a conspiracy theory. My ex-boss—I was a barista, before the accident—owned the hospital and millions of other corporations. In real life, she’s kind of flaky and has a misspelled Chinese tattoo. Anyway, she wanted me to sign a contract with her and I didn’t want to. She got so mad she kidnapped my mother and my brother and said that if I didn’t sign the contract, they’d die. Now, I was in a coma just for two days, but this went on for weeks. I went all over the country trying to find
friends who had money I could borrow. I flew on jets and stayed at hotels and saw things at places I’ve never been to in my life—but when I came out of the coma and looked them up on the internet, there they were.” There’s a muffled question, and she shrugs. “Like that shiny mirrored bean in
Chicago,” she says. “And this place in Kansas that has a twenty-thousand- pound ball of twine inside. I mean, why would I have known that?”
The video ends before she can give me what I really want: an explanation. More than the cat lady’s, this woman’s experience resonates
with mine. She, too, lived through more time while she was unconscious than she did while she was hooked up to machines. And her journey was filled with real-world details that weren’t part of her life pre-accident. But then, who knows what cognitive thorns caught in the folds of her brain?
Like Dr. DeSantos said—maybe she had read the Guinness World Records when she was younger; maybe the facts she unconsciously retained bubbled up to the surface of her subconscious like a hot spring.
The third story is a newspaper article about a fifty-two-year-old man named Eric Genovese, who has lived in Cedar Rapids since birth. He was a Poland Spring truck driver and he got hit by a car as he was crossing the street with a corporate water delivery. In the time it took EMTs to
resuscitate him—a matter of minutes—he said he lived an entirely different life. “When I looked in the mirror I knew it was me, but I was completely different. Younger, and with a new face, and that felt right. I had a different job—I was a computer engineer,” he was quoted as saying. “The woman who worked next to me in a cubicle, she had an abusive boyfriend, and I spent months trying to get her to ditch the guy and to realize I was in love with her. I proposed and we got married, and a year later we had a little girl. We named her Maya, after my wife’s mother. When I woke up, after I was revived … none of it made sense. I kept asking where my wife was, and my baby girl. For me, years had passed, but for everyone else it was like twenty minutes. I had this burning urge to pray a bunch of times during the day and I knew whole passages of religious text that no one could identify, not even me. Turned out to be the Quran. I was raised Catholic; I went to parochial school. But after I woke up, I was Muslim.”
Even though this is an article and I cannot hear his voice, there is something in his words that speaks to me. A desperation. A discombobulation. A … wonder.
I type his name into Facebook. There are a plethora of Eric Genoveses, but only one in Cedar Rapids.
I click the message button. My hands hover over the keyboard.
The psychologist has encouraged me to find a footing in this world, even if it feels strange. There is more than enough scientific evidence that the medication used to sedate me could have messed with my mind sufficiently to create what I thought was an alternate reality, but what everyone else
recognizes as a drug dream. There are dozens of witnesses to the fact that I was lying in a hospital for ten days; I am the only person who thinks
differently. Or to put it another way: the facts add up to one explanation that anyone rational would accept.
But none of those people experienced what I did.
And there are all kinds of things that used to be considered inconceivable but that turned out to be the opposite—from the earth circling the sun to black holes to diseases that jump from bats to humans. Sometimes the
impossible is possible.
I don’t know why I keep feeling the tug back to that other place. I don’t know why I’m not thanking my lucky stars to be alive and here. But I do
believe that there’s a reason I cannot let go of this—science and doctors and logic be damned.
And I think Eric Genovese might know what I’m talking about.
Hello, I type. You don’t know me, but I read your story in the newspaper. I was on a ventilator for five days.
I think I lived a different life, too.
On April 19, we celebrate my birthday.
Finn orders a fat slice of cake from one of our favorite delis. “Carrot cake?” I ask, when he sets it on the table.
“It’s your favorite,” Finn says. “We always split it when it’s on the menu.”
Because it is his favorite, but I don’t say that. He’s gone out of his way to make sure he’s not working tonight, and he’s trying to make the day special for me, even if it looks and feels exactly like yesterday and I haven’t left the apartment in days.
When he sings to me, I have an uncanny sense that I’ve done this before, because I have. I think about how Beatriz made me a cake; how Gabriel and I slept outside by a campfire. How he gave me a volcano as a present.
Since we don’t have birthday candles, Finn scrounges up a fancy Jo
Malone scented candle that Eva gave me for Christmas and lights it. When he hands me a jewelry-size box, my blood thunders in my ears.
Thisisitthisisitthisisit. The thought becomes a second pulse. It feels like more than just the biggest question I will ever be asked; it is the understanding that the answer will be for life.
For life.
Which one?
Finn bumps his shoulder against mine. “Open it,” he urges.
I manage to stretch a smile over my face and I tug at the improvised wrapping paper—yesterday’s Times. Inside is a little bracelet that says
WARRIOR.
“That’s how I think of you,” Finn admits. “I am so fucking glad you’re a fighter, Di.”
He leans in, threading his hand through my hair and kissing me. When I pull away, I lift the bracelet from the box and he helps me put it on. “Do you like it?”
It is rose gold, and catches the light, and it’s not an engagement ring. I love it.
I look up to find Finn already digging into the slice of cake. “Get in here,” he says, his mouth full, “before I finish it all.”
I feed my sourdough starter. I watch YouTube tutorials so I can cut Finn’s hair. I have another session with Dr. DeSantos. I FaceTime Rodney and we dissect the new email we received from Sotheby’s, saying that we will
continue to be furloughed through the summer.
The United States crosses a million cases of Covid-19.
I stop using my quad cane. Although I get tired if I am on my feet too long and even one flight of stairs leaves me winded, balance is no longer an issue. I go to put Candis away in my closet and when I do, I remember the shoebox with my old art supplies inside.
Carefully, I tug it loose and set it on the bed.
I peel back the cover and find acrylic paints and a crusty palette and brushes. My fingers sift through the cool metal tubes and my nails catch on dried bits of paint. Something unfurls in me, like the thinnest green shoot from a seed that’s been buried.
It has been so long since I painted that I don’t have an easel, I don’t have gesso, I don’t have a canvas. The wall is the perfect surface to work on, but this is a rental and I can’t. Finally I manage to tug the dresser away from the wall. It’s something we picked up at a secondhand shop and primed with
the intent of repainting one day—but we never got around to it. The wood on the back is smooth and white and waiting.
I sit down on the floor with a pencil and begin, in rough, sweeping strokes, to draw. It feels otherworldly, like I’m a medium channeling from somewhere else, watching the unlikely manifest before my eyes. I tumble into the zone, blocking out the sounds of the city and the occasional ping of
my phone. I squeeze a rainbow of color on the palette, touch the tip of a brush to a carmine line, and draw it over the wood like a scalpel. There’s a sense of relief at having made contact, and anxiety at not knowing what
comes next.
I don’t notice the sun going down and I don’t hear Finn’s keys in the door when he comes home. By then, I have covered the back of the dresser with color and shape, sea and sky. There is paint in my hair and under my fingernails, my joints are stiff from sitting, and I am thousands of miles away when I realize Finn is standing in front of me, calling my name.
I blink up at him. He’s showered and a towel is wrapped around his waist. “You’re home,” I say.
“And you’re painting.” A smile ghosts over his lips. “On our bureau.” “I didn’t have a canvas,” I tell him.
“I see.” Finn moves to stand behind me, so that he can view what I’ve done. I try to stare at it, too, through a stranger’s eyes.
The sky is an unholy cobalt, with breaths of clouds like afterthoughts. They’re mirrored in the still surface of a lagoon. Flamingos goose-step across a sandbar, or sleep with their legs bent into acute angles. A manchineel tree squats like the old crone in a fairy tale, poison at her fingertips.
Finn crouches down beside me. He stretches out a hand toward the art, but acrylics dry so quickly I know he cannot smudge anything. “Diana,” he says after a moment. “This is … I didn’t know you could paint like this.”
He points to two small figures, far in the distance, so tiny they would easily be overlooked if you weren’t paying attention.
“Where’s this supposed to be?” Finn asks. I don’t answer. I don’t have to.
“Oh,” he says, standing again. He takes a step away, and then another, until he has found a smile to wear. “You’re a very good artist,” Finn says, keeping his voice light. “What else are you hiding from me?”
By the time we go to bed that night, Finn has maneuvered the dresser back into position so that the lagoon I’ve drawn is flush against the wall, hidden away. I don’t mind. I like knowing there is a side to it that nobody would ever guess is there.
Finn, coming off a forty-hour shift at the hospital, is asleep nearly as soon as his head hits the pillow. He clutches me against him the way a child
holds tight to a stuffed animal, a talisman to keep the monsters away from them both.
The first night Finn and I slept together, as he trailed his hands over my skin, he told me that you can never really touch anything, because everything is made of atoms, and atoms have electrons inside them, which have a negative charge. Particles repel other particles that have a similar charge. This means when you lie down in bed, the electrons that make up your body push away the electrons that make up the mattress. You’re actually floating an infinitesimal distance above it.
I had stroked my hand down the center of his chest. So you’re hallucinating this feeling? I said.
No, he replied, catching my hand and kissing it. Or so I felt. It’s our
brains working overtime. The nerve cells get a message that some foreign electrons got close enough in space and time to repel our personal
electromagnetic field. Our brains tell us that’s the sensation of touch.
You’re saying this is all make-believe? I asked, rolling on top of him.
This is why I shouldn’t date a scientist.
He held my hips in his hands. We’re all in our own little worlds. Come visit mine, I had said, and I let him slide inside.
Now, I feel Finn’s heat surrounding me and the rough of his skin pressed to mine and I close my eyes. Even wedged against him, I imagine that
invisible seam between us.
My throat is on fire and there is an anvil on my chest. I feel hands on me, tugging and rolling and smacking me hard between the shoulder blades. My eyes are crusted and stinging and the pressure under my ribs is unbearable. Breathe, I command myself, but the mandate dies in a vacuum.
Then suddenly the heel of a hand presses on my forehead and my nose is pinched shut and my mouth is covered. A gust of heat inflates me like a balloon. I use all my strength to push away, to roll to the side, and the dam bursts. I cough and vomit fluid that burns, that cramps my belly and my sides. I cough and cough and finally gasp in the sweetest, cleanest stream of air.
I fall back, spent, becoming aware of other sensations: the rasp of sand on my skin and the bite of stones, blood coursing from a cut on my lip, the weight of the sun on my brow. A strand of hair is caught across my face and I don’t have the energy to brush it away.
Suddenly it’s gone, and the bright light shining in my eyes is, too. A shadow spreads over me like a protective wing.
Diana.
I force my eyes open and there is Gabriel, dripping wet, leaning over me. His hands frame my face, and when he smiles, it pulls at me, like we have been sewn together with invisible thread.
Everything hurts and he is the sun I shouldn’t stare into but cannot turn away from. “Dios mío,” he says. “I thought I lost you.”
Coffee. I can smell it. I burrow deeper into the covers and then I feel a warm hand on my shoulder. A kiss on the back of my neck.
I turn, a smile lighting me up from tip to toe.
I push myself up against the pillows. Finn hands me the mug and I cup my hands around the ceramic, feeling its heat and its solidity.
Then, to my shock and his, I burst into tears.
